Just Live, Baby!

Behold Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders. The occasion was the National Football League’s annual meetings in Phoenix last March, and Mr. Davis — always “Mr.” for supplicants trying to get his attention — had agreed to a short interview. The Raiders’ press department, adept in the ways of Soviet-era obfuscation, had neither confirmed nor denied Davis’s presence in Phoenix, but here he was, just after 9 a.m., standing in the hallway of the Arizona Biltmore.

Yes. Nonetheless, the first thing you notice about Al Davis is his fragility. He moves with both hands clutching a walker, taking small, mincing steps, and he has an attendant trailing behind him, seemingly to make sure he doesn’t topple over backward. Davis has watery blue eyes and an aquiline nose. His sartorial style remains defiantly retro: hair in a pompadour, body in a polyester tracksuit. He wears a Super Bowl ring on each hand. He is 78.

Davis began our conversation with a diversionary feint, talking current events instead of football. “You got these newspapers screaming at the president of the United States to get out,” he said, “and the president screaming to stay in. It concerns me, obviously. As it should anyone who has any interest in what’s going on in this country.” Davis was concerned about Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, too. “He’s going to socialize that country and take away land. Now, is that bad? One country — Cuba — survived with it. I say survived. I don’t want to say prospered.”

I told Davis I had no idea he was interested in foreign affairs. “No, I know foreign affairs,” he said. “From a strategic standpoint dating back to World War II, and maybe a little before that, to the growth of the Third Reich.”

This was an interesting place to take things. In 1981, in a conversation with the sportswriter Gary Smith, Davis confessed he was “captivated” by Hitler. Coming from a Jewish man who had grown up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the remark invited all sorts of inquiries.

Davis chuckled when I reminded him of the article. “I didn’t tell him that,” he said. Davis paused. “He had to be stopped, you know?”

Gary Smith?

“No, Hitler. Now, was there some admiration for what they were doing? If you were connected with football, you had to have some admiration. You know, quick strike.”

The Raiders and their quick-strike, “vertical” passing game were so successful that, over four decades, the team put together the best winning percentage in the N.F.L. And Al Davis was both the source and the beneficiary of that success, for no owner inhabits a sports franchise as thoroughly as he does. Your garden-variety megalomaniac like George Steinbrenner can achieve a certain grandiosity, but Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and 20 World Series championships put their stamp on the Yankees long before Steinbrenner made the scene. Davis has been with the Raiders for 43 of the team’s 47 seasons. He has been to five Super Bowls and won three times. He has been the team’s head coach, its general manager and its managing general partner. (Davis acquired a small ownership stake in 1966, then leveraged it into control of the team.) He minted the team’s muscular catchphrases — “just win, baby,” “pride and poise,” “commitment to excellence” — and he chose its silver-and-black uniforms. (Davis, as it happens, is colorblind.) Davis spends most of his time in his Oakland aerie; “I’m not really part of society,” he once said. Steve Ortmayer, who worked for Davis for 14 years as an assistant coach and director of football operations, says: “His life is the Raiders. That’s not a statement to be taken lightly, like a lot of people’s life is what they do. It’s to an extent that he has never taken a day off from the Raiders. Never.”

This makes Davis the last practitioner of a classical style of sports management you might call personality-driven football. As perfected by Paul Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals and George Halas of the Chicago Bears, personality-driven football is the psychological joining of owner and team. Davis flouted league decorum in the front office; the Raiders flouted it on the field. But in the new N.F.L. — which, in his charmingly out-of-time way, Davis has likened to I.B.M. — teams tend to be owned by captains of industry and are no more an extension of their owners’ personalities than their fast-food franchises or theme parks or used-car empires. Davis, on the other hand, has no other business. “We’re not a club where the owner was in the widget business,” says Amy Trask, the Raiders’ C.E.O. Davis pours everything he has into the Raiders.

Which may not be enough anymore. There was a time when, with apologies to the former N.F.L. commissioner Pete Rozelle and Tex Schramm, the president and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, you could have called Davis the savviest man in the N.F.L. But the league, which has always strived for competitive parity, has caught up with Davis. In both its breakneck growth and its adoption of many of the Raiders’ methods, the N.F.L. has bumped up against the limits of personality-driven football, because it takes more than one man’s instincts to run a successful team. Someone must monitor the salary cap, make sense of the vast amount of data on college prospects and run the stadium — which in the Raiders’ case happens to be one of the most decrepit in sports.

Since 2003, the Raiders have put together the worst record in the N.F.L. Davis has been through four head coaches in the past six seasons, most recently the hapless Art Shell, who also coached the Raiders from 1989 to 1994. Shell made it through one season the second time around, overseeing the most dismal season in Davis’s years with the team. Those Raiders were 2-14 and finished dead last in the league in total yards gained and points scored, and by season’s end Shell, convinced that a Raiders’ executive was undermining his standing with Davis, was making cryptic references to a “fox in the chicken coop.” An assistant coach offered to fight players on the sideline.

This is the Raiders’ baroque period. “They’re like North Korea,” one rival team official told me. “They’re in the community of nations, but they’re kind of not.” The same official added that the Raiders are the only business that has ever said no when he called and asked to leave a message. The team and its owner have long been mysterious (one of Davis’s players once compared him to Greta Garbo), but the lengthy silences were taken to mean that Davis was concocting some ingenious scheme — a new offense, a surprise draft choice, even moving the whole team to Los Angeles, which he did in 1982 for 13 years and has threatened to do again.

Now the silences seem to indicate something else.

Football men are Naturally paranoid creatures, and because Davis has little life outside football, he maintains a wariness even in his private exchanges. “What he decides to let you see is what you get,” says Gene Upshaw, a former guard with the Raiders who is now the executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association. “He’s not going to let many people inside his head, his brain, his thinking, his philosophy. He’s just going to do what he does, and you just accept it and move on.” Upshaw suspects, but cannot exactly confirm, that on a few recent occasions Davis asked him to be general manager of the Raiders. Davis would call Upshaw and say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do” or “I don’t have anyone to run this club.” But he never said, “Gene, please come be my general manager,” and Upshaw figures this is a purposeful omission, designed to allow Davis to maintain a plausible deniability.

Omission is one of Davis’s favorite strategies — he lets others fill in the blanks. Since his health keeps him away from the field during practices, Davis frequents a small room in the Raiders’ headquarters in Alameda, south of Oakland, where he spends hours pouring over “cutups,” quick snatches of video that show every play from the previous week’s game. If Davis crosses paths with an assistant coach, he’ll stop him and ask a purposefully hazy question: “Say, how did that kid beat us across the middle?” The coach will begin nervously scanning his visual memory for the one play that Davis is talking about. He is wary of Davis’s temper and humbled by his football knowledge, which despite his age remains unparalleled. If he gives the correct answer — the safety took a bad angle, say — Davis will never mention the matter again. If the assistant tries to fool him, Davis will never let him forget it.

What Davis’s friends would most like to hear from him is what’s wrong with his health. Last year, the Raiders installed a special elevator in McAfee Coliseum, where they play, so that Davis could get to the owner’s box without climbing any stairs. But Davis insists his health is fine except for a bum quadriceps. “I’ve known him since I was 17, and he’s never going to admit that he feels bad,” says Paul Maguire, an ESPN football announcer and former player, who met Davis in 1955. “If you ask him how he’s feeling, he’ll say, ‘My team’s not doing well.’ That concerns him more than any ailment he might have.”

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Over the course of four decades, Al Davis built the Oakland Raiders in his own image: militant but inclusive, radical but tender-hearted, a band of outré warriors who took the N.F.L. by storm. But in an increasingly buttoned-down league, can one man's peculiar vision survive?Credit
Gerald Scarfe

Davis’s inner circle, a small, football-centric group, includes three former Raiders and members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Jim Otto, a center who played 15 seasons; Ted Hendricks, a 6-foot-7 outside linebacker known as the Mad Stork; and George Blanda, who provided superb backup quarterback play and field-goal kicking until the outlandish age of 48. Davis has enormous affection for these men and invariably links his favorite adjective, great, to their names — as in “the great Jim Otto.” Until a few years ago, Otto and Blanda and Hendricks could often be seen on the field at games flanking their paterfamilias like some kind of Praetorian Guard.

These days, the former Raiders are, like Davis, considerably more frail — Otto has had 28 knee surgeries and recently had one of his legs amputated. When in town, they often join Davis to watch the Raiders play from the owner’s suite. Here, there is a certain decorum. The ex-Raiders may pipe up to interject an opinion now and again, but if the team is losing, the three of them will sit silently while Davis stews. “It was a long year last year,” Hendricks says. During a Raiders loss, the only noise in Davis’s suite is a fus illade of insults after nearly every play. Offense has always been his primary interest, and when the Raiders aren’t throwing long — “attacking,” as Davis likes to say — he has been known to dispatch the great Jim Otto to visit with the Raiders’ assistant coaches and, as Otto puts it, “remind them of something that’s going on down on the field.”

The Saturday night dinners Davis gives before road games have a more jovial feel. Otto, Hendricks and Blanda are often there, joined by Davis’s friend Dr. Robert Albo; his brother, Jerry; and their wives, including Davis’s wife of nearly 53 years, Carol, whom he calls “Car-OH-lee.” Unusual for Davis, there is not a word of football discussed. More recently, Davis has also discouraged the discussion of politics, owing to tense arguments that Hendricks says predate the current Bush administration. Davis never drinks alcohol, but he’s a lively host, and the conversation hops from military history to women’s basketball to one of Davis’s secret passions, music. Among the many friends Davis has eulogized over the years are the jazz singers Sarah Vaughn and Billy Eckstine. The eulogy is one of Davis’s best mediums — he is sweet and often funny, even for those with whom he crossed swords.

“Get a good picture, please — I want everyone to know I’m alive.” That was Davis’s unusual request last December, after he made his way into the Raiders’ locker room following a sloppy, turnover-filled loss to the St. Louis Rams.

As this and his proof-of-life moment in Phoenix demonstrate, death has been on Davis’s mind quite a lot lately. It fascinates and confounds him. “It’s the only thing that I don’t think I’ve licked in my life,” he says in an ESPN documentary that aired in 2003. “I wasn’t able to save some people who were dying.” When Davis’s loved ones fall ill, he snaps into action: former Raiders like Willie Brown are dispatched to deliver checks to cover medical expenses, airplanes are commandeered to whisk the sick to distant hospitals — anything to keep friends and former players alive.

Davis credits his steadfast bedside vigil with helping Carol recover from a heart attack she suffered in 1979. When a Raiders employee named Del Courtney contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disease that can cause complete muscular paralysis, in 1971, Davis would stand next to him and say, “You’re a Raider, and Raiders don’t die.” (Courtney made a miraculous recovery.) But even with his interventions there have been the inevitable disappointments: the death of former Raiders like John Matuszak, who died of heart failure in 1989; Lyle Alzado, who succumbed to cancer in 1992; and more recently, Bill Walsh, who coached with the Raiders for one season and whom Davis visited two days before he died this summer. When we met in Phoenix, Davis was still reeling from the deaths of Ernie Ladd and Ernie Wright, whom he coached as an assistant with the American Football League’s Chargers in the 1960s.

Lately, Davis has reached beyond his inner circle to talk about matters of mortality. Last year, he called Jack Kemp, whom he met when they were with the Chargers — Kemp as quarterback and Davis as wide receivers coach. Kemp had been busy writing op-eds calling for the abolition of the estate tax, which his fellow Republicans often refer to as the “death tax.” “Al called me when he read one of my articles,” Kemp told me, “and he said that I was right, and that he was calling to say he supported tax reform and putting an end to the so-called death tax.” Davis was not putting his own affairs in order, he assured Kemp; he said he was looking out for his African-American players who were the first in their families to earn big money. Kemp hadn’t heard much from Davis in recent years, but he was giddy over the endorsement. “I think Al’s a good old-fashioned Hubert Humphrey Democrat, and I’m a Ronald Reagan Republican, and here we were in solid agreement,” he says.

Another recent Davis confidant is Bill Romanowski, the All-Pro linebacker who played his final two seasons in Oakland. After suffering more than 20 concussions in his playing career, Romo, as he’s known, set about creating a “brain fuel” that would restore his mental powers. (That Romanowski was considered one of the N.F.L.’s dirtiest players makes you wonder whether this was a good idea.) Romo dubbed his brain fuel Neuro1 and now markets it as an elixir to help you “confidently recall names and facts” and to “enhance one’s quality of life and performance.” Feeling fully revitalized, Romanowski recently called his former employer and said, “Mr. Davis, I think I can change your life!” Davis summoned Romanowski to Oakland, and now, Romanowski says, he visits Davis three or four times a year to discuss nutrition. When I asked if Neuro1 had enhanced Davis’s mental acuity, Romanowski paused and then said, “Well, you talked to him, didn’t you?”

Davis’s football intelligence was never so much a matter of x’s and o’s as a cultural consciousness that Davis has called his “gestalt.” The Raiders were a peculiar mixture of Davis’s desires. Well into the 1960s and ’70s, pro football retained a militaristic snap. George Plimpton, the journalist and erstwhile quarterback, wrote that the ’60s were “so violent that it is impossible to accept the metaphor of football, and its popularity, without wondering whether it reflects some of the country’s excesses.” As a student of foreign affairs going back to the Third Reich, Davis plundered the association with gusto. For years, the game-day schedule he distributed to the team listed 1 o’clock — game time — as “We go to war!” Military metaphors abounded: the N.F.L.-

A.F.L. merger of 1970, which Davis initially opposed, reminded him of the agreement at Yalta; he issued statements like “The guerrilla wins if he doesn’t lose.” Howie Long, a defensive end who studied history at Villanova, found that after his indoctrination with Davis he began imagining the team’s practice center in Alameda as a fortress city in the hills of Cortona, something to be defended at all costs.

But the hard line Davis took in metaphor disguised a more liberal heart, an almost tender inclusiveness. What we tend to remember as the bad-boy Oakland Raiders — the “mélange of odds and ends, oddities and irregulars, factory seconds and seeming chain-gang escapees,” as the writer Mark Ribowsky put it — was in fact an early template for modern professional football. It is well known that Davis provided feed and care to troubled souls like Alzado and Matuszak. It is less well known that Davis was among the first wave of owners to scout the historically black colleges, from which he pulled, for example Art Shell, the rumbler on the left side of his offensive line. Davis could look at a castoff and see a future star, like Jim Plunkett, who had been cut by the San Francisco Forty-Niners, or Todd Christensen, a washed-up fullback whom Davis converted into a rangy tight end. If Davis was more paranoid and combative than other owners — he has sued the N.F.L. numerous times — his players looked upon him as unconcerned with reputation or conventional wisdom. “The truth of it is I’d been cut twice and had tryouts for four teams,” Todd Christensen told me, “so he could have been Khameini or Osama bin Laden for all I cared.”

The mix the Raiders achieved was revolutionary, and Davis managed a number of historic firsts. He became the first owner to draft an African-American quarterback in the first round, Eldridge Dickey, way back in 1968. He made Art Shell the first African-American head coach in the modern era; he made Tom Flores the first Hispanic coach. Amy Trask is the first woman to serve as chief executive of an N.F.L. team. In the 1960s, Davis moved two games out of segregated cities in the deep South when he learned the stands and local hotels would be segregated. “I just think he is absolutely unencumbered by prejudice of any type,” Trask says.

Davis wasn’t simply attempting a demographic shift but wholesale behavioral modification. In the 1970s, some N.F.L. teams were still enforcing a ludicrous, top-down propriety — the rival Kansas City Chiefs, for example, required players to wear red blazers when they traveled together. The Raiders would have none of it. “These are the greatest athletes in the world,” John Madden once said. “They’re like artists. And if you take their creativity away from them by making them robotic, then they’re going to play like robots.”

The Raiders’ ethic was organic and bottom-up. Sometime in the 1970s, Jim Plunkett and Fred Biletnikoff began sitting on their helmets during practice. There was nothing particularly special about sitting on your helmet other than most other teams in the league wouldn’t let you do it, and for the player it conveyed a certain psychic benefit.

The Raiders’ idea of a mandatory team function was “Camaraderie,” a Thursday-night drinking session masterminded by some of the more intimidating members of the offensive and defensive lines. (At Super Bowl XV in New Orleans, in 1981, the Raiders moved Camaraderie to the French Quarter, and they encircled and shared liter-size Hurricanes as if they were standing in a huddle.) The Raiders were not unfamiliar with Northern California’s counterculture scene. Linebacker Chip Oliver left the team to live in a commune. Linebacker Phil Villapiano was beaten senseless by a group of Hell’s Angels in a bar fight. Gene Upshaw kibitzed with Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and other members of the Black Panthers at one of Upshaw’s Oakland bars. Seale and Newton, Upshaw says, were Raiders fans, because they admired the team’s fierce sense of loyalty.

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1977 Al Davis and the Raiders, one and the same.Credit
George Gojkovich/Getty Images

Indeed, it is tempting to regard the team Davis cobbled together as the N.F.L.’s first radical political organization, with a militant ethos and an open-minded approach toward membership. “Al always felt the enormity of the Raiders, the mystique of the Raiders, could control players, because players wanted to fit into that mystique,” Steve Ortmayer says. A more conventional owner might have insisted on a few nods to decorum: coats and ties on the team plane, no fraternizing with the Panthers. But Davis’s refusal to commit to a moral code other than “just win, baby” helped him juggle all the heterogeneity. Excluding anyone on the basis of race or attitude might cost him a player and give another owner an edge. Davis had an expansive vision of what could make a football team. What other teams craved, the Raiders had in spades: camaraderie.

What changed was not so much Davis losing his touch as the rest of the league catching up. Two events leveled the playing field. One was the N.F.L.’s belated adoption of more expansive free agency and a salary cap in 1993. As Ortmayer puts it, this was a problem “because it broke down the ability of Al to run the operation totally as a family.” Suddenly the Raiders’ camaraderie had less appeal than the big contract. The other change was that the N.F.L. became more like the Raiders. The N.F.L. now has African-American coaches like Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith and African-American quarterbacks like Steve McNair and Vince Young. The remnants of faux-military culture have given way to a relaxed atmosphere that can accommodate even those players with “attitude” problems. Randy Moss, whom the Raiders acquired from Minnesota in 2005, quit on the team last season; he suggested in a radio interview, unwisely but perhaps not incorrectly, that “there’s a lot of funny things going on around here in this organization.” When the Raiders traded Moss to New England this spring, it was a measure of how the N.F.L. has evolved that the wonkish and corporate Patriots, rather than the Raiders, were thought to provide a nurturing environment in which a provocateur like Moss could flourish.

Davis’s cultural innovations had been integrated into the N.F.L.’s mother brain. And thanks to further measures like harsh punishments for on- and off-the-field transgressions, the league has entered a period where there’s very little cultural difference between the franchises. “The gap between the smartest owner and the dumbest owner is much narrower than it was a generation ago,” says Michael MacCambridge, the author of “America’s Game,” a history of professional football. This change has proved beneficial for historically benighted franchises like the Arizona Cardinals and disastrous for once-smart franchises like the Raiders. As the new century approached, and the Raiders hadn’t won a Super Bowl since 1984, they had the desperate look of every other mediocre N.F.L. franchise. All that remained of personality-driven football were Davis’s quirks.

Not long ago, I called Rich Gannon, the quarterback who led the Raiders to the Super Bowl in 2003, and asked him to explain Davis’s management style. “He’s a complicated guy,” Gannon said. “I think he’s misunderstood at times, and other times people’s interpretations and impressions are fairly accurate.” When Gannon came to Oakland in 1999, the Raiders were already sliding into mediocrity. Davis had let his personality run wild; he was on his third head coach in five seasons; the Raiders’ players were teetering on the edge of revolt. “Guys coming in 5, 10 minutes late to the practice field without their jerseys on,” Gannon recalled. “Players that had total disrespect for the coaches and the other players. Just a sick, sick, debilitating environment to work in.”

Davis was still practicing personality-driven football, but in impatient rather than visionary mode. This affected his coaches most conspicuously. In 1998, Davis hired Jon Gruden, who was 34, to be head coach. Along with personnel man Bruce Allen and offensive coordinator Bill Callahan, Gruden began the slow process of restoring order to the Raiders by adding battle-tested veterans: Gannon, Charlie Garner and Jerry Rice. But Davis clashed with Gruden over his contract and, in a huff, allowed him to leave for Tampa Bay in 2002; Allen followed Gruden a season later; Callahan led the Raiders to the 2003 Super Bowl, lost to Gruden’s Buccaneers and was fired a year later. In one swift stroke, all the people who had returned the Raiders to respectability — who had brought the kind of fresh ideas that smoothed the rough edges of Davis’s personality — had vanished. That left only Davis. “Look what’s happened since then,” Gannon told me. “They’ve had the worst record in the N.F.L. over the last four years. Last year — that was a travesty.” He added, “You could have brought in Tom Landry or Vince Lombardi and it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Landry and Lombardi being unavailable, last winter Davis turned to Lane Kiffin, an offensive coordinator at the University of Southern California. (Strangely, Davis had first interviewed Steve Sarkisian, another U.S.C. coach; Sarkisian reportedly turned down the job, though the Raiders claim it was never offered to him.) Kiffin is a boyish 32, two years younger than the Raiders’ defensive tackle Warren Sapp. When Kiffin interviewed with Davis late one night in January, the old owner dazzled his young pupil by reeling off the precise heights, weights and 40-yard-dash times of prospects going back decades. When I met up with Kiffin a few months later, he was still giddy in telling the story. “Imagine you’re interviewing with an owner who’s been a great coach as well, who’s already in the Hall of Fame,” Kiffin said. “He’s not just managing the team interview. This is about x’s and o’s, coaches, play-calling, everything, because he knows it all.”

Far from a naïf, however, Kiffin has so far proved to be a capable bureaucratic infighter. The Raiders had the No. 1 choice in April’s draft, and Davis is credited with selecting JaMarcus Russell, the fiercely large quarterback from Louisiana State University. (At the end of July, Russell still had not signed with the Raiders, and the team signed Daunte Culpepper to compete for the starting job.) But Oakland’s boldest off-season move, credited to Kiffin, was to trade Moss to New England for two players and a draft choice. Kiffin installed Mark Jackson, an associate from U.S.C., as director of football development, and he moved Robert Gallery, a former high pick, from offensive right tackle, where Davis reportedly wanted him, to left guard. Kiffin is thoroughly unmoved by Davis’s “just win, baby” propaganda. “Obviously, there’s an unbelievable tradition and history there,” Kiffin told me. “But over the course of time, things change. It’s an organization that’s fallen on hard times lately. It’s no secret — he realizes that.”

Though he talks to Kiffin on the phone every day, Davis has shown signs of receding in recent years. One agent told me that last season he never spoke to Davis in the course of contract negotiations; a former assistant coach told me Davis had minimal, if any, input into the game plans. Davis has even become something of a league man. A persistent noodge to Pete Rozelle (who called Davis a “charming rogue”), Davis rallied owners last spring to approve an extension to the collective bargaining agreement. Paul Tagliabue, the departing commissioner, appointed Davis to the committee to select his successor. Davis even gave up his longstanding suit against Alameda County, which for a time controlled the sale of Raiders tickets.

Davis is the team’s titular head, and will be as long he’s alive, but the team is no longer a revolutionary force. Last season, friends report, you could see the pain on his face — clearly, the old methods weren’t working. Tom Flores, who coached the Raiders to two Super Bowl titles in the 1980s, visited Davis in May and found him blaming himself for the Raiders’ recent frustrations. “I think he realizes he’s not 57 years old,” Flores says. “He wants to do this and get it done as quickly as possible. But he knows it can’t be done overnight.”

“He feels like he wants to do more,” Bill Parcells, another longtime Davis friend, says. “I just hope time doesn’t run out, you know?”

“Huddle-huddle-huddle-huddle!” Part of Lane Kiffin’s plan to revitalize the Raiders is to make the team’s training camp in Napa Valley a bastion of positive reinforcement. When I visited one afternoon, Kiffin was making his way through the ranks and tossing footballs to unsuspecting defensive tackles. When he flipped one to Warren Sapp, who checked into camp at a svelte 282 pounds, Kiffin said, “He’s lost weight and he’s working on his hands!” Sapp replied, “I’ve had these since I was 5, Coach!” Even beyond the usual optimism at the start of training camp, a new friskiness prevailed. When the Raiders lined up to run a play, Kiffin’s assistants gathered behind the line of scrimmage. As soon as the play was over, they ran up like expectant stage moms to congratulate the players.

Davis was not in Napa that day — or given his ability to transcend time and space, perhaps he was. The reliably surrealistic Raiders press department would neither confirm nor deny his presence in Napa or Oakland or anywhere else. (He showed up on the practice field the next day.) Davis had once been an omnipresent figure at these practices. Gene Upshaw remembers how, when he was still playing, he would see Davis lurking behind him as he was about to run a play; and then, after running it, he’d see Davis clear across the field; and then, after running another play, Upshaw would look up and there was Davis standing right behind him again — Davis had covered the field faster than Lester Hayes! “Every day I go on the football field I think about him,” Willie Brown, now an assistant coach with the team, told me.

If any Raider in Napa seemed linked intellectually to Davis’s old Raider irregulars, it was Jerry Porter, who, with the departure of Randy Moss, has become the Raiders’ best and most mercurial wideout. Last year, after a feud with Art Shell, Porter showed up in Napa wearing a professional wrestling belt and a T-shirt featuring an extended middle finger. Shell would later suspend Porter for four games for insubordination after Porter yelled at him during a practice; according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Porter also availed himself of Al Davis’s private parking space. In Napa, Porter was claiming selective amnesia (“I don’t remember last year,” he said), making a series of leaping catches and periodically throwing a penalty flag to entertain his teammates.

I pulled Porter aside after practice and asked him what it was like to play for Al Davis. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t necessarily play for Al,” he said. Say again? “I said I don’t necessarily play for Al,” Porter said. “Al’s not our coach.”

Even so, I said, between the Raider mystique, the five Super Bowls and “just win, baby,” the Davis legend, if not Davis himself, must surely permeate the Raiders’ facilities. “No, you see him in passing,” Porter said. “We have a good back-and-forth conversation of about 20 words, and we’re on our way.” And what wisdom did Davis, the aficionado of the long-bomb passing game, impart? Porter was hard-pressed to recall anything specific. “Something about football,” he said.

This is the post-Davis Raiders. A team with its own quirks, coaches and vision, but without the considerable imprint of its owner. Through the ministrations of Dr. Romanowski, Davis may be able to emerge every now and then to declare that reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. Lane Kiffin may succeed in reversing the embarrassments of the last four seasons. But Davis’s personality-driven football is dead. Jerry Porter delivered the eulogy, without malice: “The Raider mystique does not exist anymore.” .

Bryan Curtis, a contributing writer for Play, has also written about the marketing of the Red Bull energy drink and the quarterback Troy Smith.